Purple Haze

There is a strange haze that has blown in off the water, and the phallic highrises, each reaching out taller to the sky than their neighbor have been cloaked in a purplish grey mist. The outlines of the buildings and trees are crisp, but the colors are distorted, and depth perception is off. Everything seems oddly flat, like a painted facade in a homey Sicilian restaurant where the plaster is starting to crumble off the walls.

It feels like I am watching a grainy home video of someone else's life. Someone else who I only realize is me on a philisophical level. Her reality has become one of stilted memories crashing through the frame as I chase my childhood through empty playgrounds and play hide and seek behind closed doors. Laughter caught on tape, rewound and replayed has lost its melodious innocence, sounding canned instead. But I still manage to scream at the appropriate times. The tears still tumble forth with remarkable precision.

I wish I could excise these moments, the cutting their emptiness away with surgical exactness. But how do you remove a void? How is it possible to excise the emptiness that is everything you are and all you have ever known? Once it is gone, what would remain?